SFC Animation

As explained in the relevant section of the language reference, an SFC POU is structured in a set of steps, each of which is either active or inactive at any given moment. Once started up, this SFC-specific debugging tool animates the SFC documents by highlighting the active steps.

Animation OFF	Animation ON	Animation ON in hold status

In the left column, a portion of an SFC network is shown, diagram animation being off. In the right column the same portion of network is displayed when the live debug mode is active. The picture in the middle column shows that steps S1 and S3 are currently active, whereas Init, S2, and S4 are inactive.In the right column the same portion of network is displayed with steps S1 and S3 that are currently active but in hold status.This may occur in SFC blocks when they are children of a parent in inactive status.Note that the SFC animation manager tests periodically the state of all steps, the user not being allowed to edit the sampling period. Therefore, it may happen that a step remains active for a slot of time too short to be displayed.The fact that a step is never highlighted does not imply that its action is not executed, it may simply mean that the sampling rate is too slow to detect the execution.